It's time to end speciesism!
Animals are made of flesh, bone, and blood, just as you and I are.
They feel pain and joy, just as we do; they form friendships, grieve for lost loved ones, communicate with one another, raise families, and use tools.
But whether or not they are "like us", they deserve respect, compassion, and empathy.
In the words of philosopher Jeremy Bentham:
"The question is not: 'Can they reason?' nor: 'Can they talk?' but: 'Can they suffer?'"
There’s also a nice story in there by Charles Darwin’s biographer, James Moore, who quotes Darwin as follows:
“To say man is the pinnacle of creation and all things were created for him ... Darwin says that is the same arrogance we see in the slave master.”
Anyway, there you have it: “Speciesism"!
150,000,000,000 animals are killed worldwide by the meat, egg, dairy and fish industries.
These numbers do NOT include the many millions of animals killed each year in vivisection laboratories.
They do NOT include the millions of dogs and cats killed in animal shelters every year.
They do NOT include the animals who died while held captive in the animal-slavery enterprises of circuses, rodeos, zoos, and marine parks.
They do NOT include the animals killed while pressed into such blood sports as bullfighting, cockfighting, dogfighting, and bear-baiting, nor do they include horses and greyhounds who were exterminated after they were no longer deemed suitable for racing.
These numbers do NOT include the many millions of animals killed each year in vivisection laboratories.
They do NOT include the millions of dogs and cats killed in animal shelters every year.
They do NOT include the animals who died while held captive in the animal-slavery enterprises of circuses, rodeos, zoos, and marine parks.
They do NOT include the animals killed while pressed into such blood sports as bullfighting, cockfighting, dogfighting, and bear-baiting, nor do they include horses and greyhounds who were exterminated after they were no longer deemed suitable for racing.
If a person truly believes that kindness is a virtue, how could it be possible to justify scalding chickens alive, forcing chemicals down rats' throats, keeping elephants in chains, or electrocuting foxes and stripping off their fur - all simply because they're "just animals"?
Just as we have ended "racism","sexism", "ageism", we must also end "speciesism". And the world will be a better and kinder place. For sure!
Speciesism
Speciesism is the assigning of different values or rights to beings on the basis of their species membership. The term was created by British psychologist Richard D. Ryder in 1973 to denote a prejudice against non-humans based on physical differences that are given moral value"I use the word 'speciesism'," he wrote in 1975, "to describe the widespread discrimination that is practised by man against other species ... Speciesism is discrimination, and like all discrimination it overlooks or underestimates the similarities between the discriminator and those discriminated against."
The term is mostly used by animal rights advocates, who argue that it is irrational or morally wrong to regard sentient beings as objects or property.
Philosopher Tom Regan argues that all animals have inherent rights and that we cannot assign them a lesser value because of a perceived lack of rationality, while assigning a higher value to infants and the mentally impaired solely on the grounds of being members of a specific species. Others argue that this valuation of a human infant, a human fetus, or a mentally impaired person is justified, not because the fetus is a fully rational human person from conception, nor because the mentally impaired are rational to the same degree as other human beings; but because the teleological and genetic orientation of any human being from conception is to develop into a rational human being and not any other creature, and because all humans have an implicit origination from two genetically human beings, and hence, both a primary genetic orientation and primary origination as the reproduction of other human beings, even if in a not fully developed state or if partially impaired. In this view, anyone who is born of human parents has the rights of human persons from conception, because the natural process of reproduction has already been initiated in biologically human organisms.
Peter Singer's philosophical arguments against speciesism are based instead on the principle of equal consideration of interests, and he has been said to support a sort of personism version of humanism.
The term is mostly used by animal rights advocates, who argue that it is irrational or morally wrong to regard sentient beings as objects or property.
Philosopher Tom Regan argues that all animals have inherent rights and that we cannot assign them a lesser value because of a perceived lack of rationality, while assigning a higher value to infants and the mentally impaired solely on the grounds of being members of a specific species. Others argue that this valuation of a human infant, a human fetus, or a mentally impaired person is justified, not because the fetus is a fully rational human person from conception, nor because the mentally impaired are rational to the same degree as other human beings; but because the teleological and genetic orientation of any human being from conception is to develop into a rational human being and not any other creature, and because all humans have an implicit origination from two genetically human beings, and hence, both a primary genetic orientation and primary origination as the reproduction of other human beings, even if in a not fully developed state or if partially impaired. In this view, anyone who is born of human parents has the rights of human persons from conception, because the natural process of reproduction has already been initiated in biologically human organisms.
Peter Singer's philosophical arguments against speciesism are based instead on the principle of equal consideration of interests, and he has been said to support a sort of personism version of humanism.
Proponents
Some philosophers, scientists, and the vast majority of humans defend Speciesism as an acceptable if not good behavior for humans. Carl Cohen, a Professor of Philosophy at the Residential College of the University of Michigan, writes:
I am a speciesist. Speciesism is not merely plausible; it is essential for right conduct, because those who will not make the morally relevant distinctions among species are almost certain, in consequence, to misapprehend their true obligations.
Jeffrey Alan Gray, British psychologist and a lecturer in experimental psychology at Oxford, similarly wrote that:
I would guess that the view that human beings matter to other human beings more than animals do is, to say the least, widespread. At any rate, I wish to defend speciesism...
A common theme in defending speciesism tends to be the argument that humans "have the right to compete with and exploit other species to preserve and protect the human species".
Opponents
Gary Francione's position differs significantly from that of Singer, author of Animal Liberation (1975). Singer, a utilitarian, rejects moral rights as a general matter and, like Ryder, regards sentience as sufficient for moral status. Singer maintains that most animals do not care about whether we kill and use them for our own purposes; they care only about how we treat them when we do use and kill them. As a result, and despite our having laws that supposedly protect animals, Francione contends that we treat animals in ways that would be regarded as torture if only humans were involved.
Richard Dawkins touches briefly on the subject in The Blind Watchmaker and The God Delusion, elucidating the connection to evolutionary theory. He compares former racist attitudes and assumptions to their present-day speciesist counterparts. In a chapter of former book entitled "The one true tree of life", he argues that it is not just zoological taxonomy that is saved from awkward ambiguity by the extinction of intermediate forms, but also human ethics and law. He describes discrimination against chimpanzees thus:
“Such is the breathtaking speciesism of our Christian-inspired attitudes, the abortion of a single human zygote (most of them are destined to be spontaneously aborted anyway) can arouse more moral solicitude and righteous indignation than the vivisection of any number of intelligent adult chimpanzees! [...] The only reason we can be comfortable with such a double standard is that the intermediates between humans and chimps are all dead.
”Dawkins more recently elaborated on his personal position towards speciesism and vegetarianism in a live discussion with Singer at The Center for Inquiry on December 7, 2007.
“What I am doing is going along with the fact that I live in a society where meat eating is accepted as the norm, and it requires a level of social courage which I haven't yet produced to break out of that. It's a little bit like the position which many people would have held a couple of hundred years ago over slavery. Where lots of people felt morally uneasy about slavery but went along with it because the whole economy of the South depended upon slavery.
”David Nibert seeks to expand the field of sociology "in order to understand how social arrangements create oppressive conditions for both humans and other animals". He compares speciesism to racism and sexism.
Some have suggested that simply to fight speciesism is not enough because intrinsic value of nature can be extended beyond sentient beings, termed the ethic of "libertarian extension". This belief system seeks to apply the principle of individual rights not only to all animals but also objects without a nervous system such as trees, plants and rocks.
Ryder rejects this in writing that "value cannot exist in the absence of consciousness or potential consciousness. Thus, rocks and rivers and houses have no interests and no rights of their own. This does not mean, of course, that they are not of value to us, and to many other painients, including those who need them as habitats and who would suffer without them."
Please continue your reading at Wikipedia
Speciesism-Discrimination due to specie of belonging:
Speciesism is the discrimination *1 of someone’s *2 interests due to his/her specie of belonging *3.
1* Discrimination (moral discrimination):
Not weighing someone’s interest fairly for arbitrary reasons (sex, specie, race, type/degree of intelligent etc.)
Normally non-human animals are discriminated using two reasons as an excuse;
A) The fact that non-human animals don’t belong to our specie, implies they don’t deserve equal consideration:
According to this we could discriminate human animals (for example) simply because they don’t belong to a certain group (skin colour, gender…) but doing this is wrong (just as discriminating due to specie is) because the group we belong to doesn’t determine our interest *2 in living and avoiding pain.
B)The fact that they lack certain capacities justifies their discrimination:
What this argument usually hides is a simple discrimination due to the specie of belonging, because human animals lacking these characteristics are usually considered morally.
If this weren’t the case and someone held that our cognitive capacities do determine the respect someone deserves (discriminating as a consequence some human animals such as babies and Alzheimer victims, etc.), the thruth is that if we are affected by suffering and pleasure it is due to our capacity to feel, not because of our intelligence, linguistic capacities etc. (although these can influence on the amount of suffering we experiment, they are not necessary to feel pain and wellbeing).
Animals (human and non-human one’s) have interest in life and in not suffering because they are aware of their experiences.
2* Interests:
Any individual with a nervous system and aware of it’s sensations has the capacity to experiment what happens in his/her life, and in consequence has interests that can be discriminated.
Those organisms lacking such capacity do not have interests, because they can in no way experiment subjective sensations (there is no “mind” that perceives “things”) and therefore cannot be discriminated morally.
Often humans respect some non-human animals (usually dogs and cats), although they would continue to be speciesist if they didn’t consider equally other animals such as cows, tunas, pigs etc.
Although I must add that although many humans do feel empathy for some non-human animals, it is probably adventurous to say they consider them their equals, and a proof of this is that these animals are usually bought, sold...this meaning, used in other ways.
3* Specie:
A specie is a taxonomic group used to classify those who share a series of common characteristics. A specie does not have interests, only those who form the species do, and therefore it is these individuals who suffer the consequences of discrimination.
Source
Speciesism is the discrimination *1 of someone’s *2 interests due to his/her specie of belonging *3.
1* Discrimination (moral discrimination):
Not weighing someone’s interest fairly for arbitrary reasons (sex, specie, race, type/degree of intelligent etc.)
Normally non-human animals are discriminated using two reasons as an excuse;
A) The fact that non-human animals don’t belong to our specie, implies they don’t deserve equal consideration:
According to this we could discriminate human animals (for example) simply because they don’t belong to a certain group (skin colour, gender…) but doing this is wrong (just as discriminating due to specie is) because the group we belong to doesn’t determine our interest *2 in living and avoiding pain.
B)The fact that they lack certain capacities justifies their discrimination:
What this argument usually hides is a simple discrimination due to the specie of belonging, because human animals lacking these characteristics are usually considered morally.
If this weren’t the case and someone held that our cognitive capacities do determine the respect someone deserves (discriminating as a consequence some human animals such as babies and Alzheimer victims, etc.), the thruth is that if we are affected by suffering and pleasure it is due to our capacity to feel, not because of our intelligence, linguistic capacities etc. (although these can influence on the amount of suffering we experiment, they are not necessary to feel pain and wellbeing).
Animals (human and non-human one’s) have interest in life and in not suffering because they are aware of their experiences.
2* Interests:
Any individual with a nervous system and aware of it’s sensations has the capacity to experiment what happens in his/her life, and in consequence has interests that can be discriminated.
Those organisms lacking such capacity do not have interests, because they can in no way experiment subjective sensations (there is no “mind” that perceives “things”) and therefore cannot be discriminated morally.
Often humans respect some non-human animals (usually dogs and cats), although they would continue to be speciesist if they didn’t consider equally other animals such as cows, tunas, pigs etc.
Although I must add that although many humans do feel empathy for some non-human animals, it is probably adventurous to say they consider them their equals, and a proof of this is that these animals are usually bought, sold...this meaning, used in other ways.
3* Specie:
A specie is a taxonomic group used to classify those who share a series of common characteristics. A specie does not have interests, only those who form the species do, and therefore it is these individuals who suffer the consequences of discrimination.
Source